RV790 and RV740 Samples Surface, Specifications more clear

Over at hardware-infos they reported that some of the first batches, rather iterations, of RV790 and RV740 engineering samples have begun surfacing. Sources reveal bits and pieces of the new GPUs' specifications to Hardware-Infos. Being some of the first samples, these are merely iterations en route the development of the final product, though trend has it that preliminary information about AMD GPUs have a tendency of turning out true. We will exempt the RV770's final stream processor count from these.

The RV740, a mainstream GPU from AMD, is on course of becoming the first GPU in production, to be built on the 40nm manufacturing node. It carries 640 stream processors and a core clock speed of 700 MHz. It features a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory bus, churning out bandwidth that rivals equally clocked GDDR3 with double the bus width. The memory bus will be clocked at speeds between 800 and 900 MHz (3.2 GT/s and 3.6 GT/s). Products will carry 512 to 1024 MB of memory. The GPU houses 32 texture memory units (TMUs) and 8 raster operations pipelines (ROPs).

As for the RV790, surprise: it has the same clock speeds as the RV770XT: 750 MHz (core) and 900 MHz (memory). The samples were equipped with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory with chips made by Qimonda.

The memory bus width remains unchanged at 256-bit. With so much similarity with the RV770, the shader domain is all that remains to serve as the differentiation factor, apart from the newer manufacturing process that hypothetically facilitates larger overclocking headroom. There is no word on the remaining specifications.